Now this is material that piques my interest more than anything: insights from one of the bigger names in the industry. Jean-Louis Gassee debunks the "Apple-must-license-its-software-or-die" myth by looking back upon the past - and if you don't know who JLG is, then please take that dunce hat and stand in the corner for three hours, contemplating your existence. Note: OSNews has a bug with using diacritic marks on the front page, so JLG's name is misspelled. It is correctly spelled in the article body.

Yes, I agree. When you license, you open the door to poor re-implementations and poor (and inconsistent) end user experiences. Apple is king of it's domain precisely because of it's totalitarian way of controlling every aspect of it's product's experience cycle. Android, for all it's openness, will have a difficult (if not impossible) time trying to reach similar heights of user satisfaction, IMHO.

Are you trying to say a company say like Falcon-Northwest couldn't do a better job of hardware choice than Apple? I call bullshit on that. You can't pull everything down to the lowest common denominator by statements like that.

Falcon-Northwest might have nice hardware, but that's not the point. Apple has carefully cultivated a certain aesthetic for their entire line of products. This aesthetic is consistently present in their hardware, software, websites, web stores, retail stores, and advertisements. Falcon-Northwest (or anyone else for that matter) could create a piece of hardware which might be technically superior to what Apple is currently offering, yet that same piece of hardware would probably break the Apple aesthetic. Sure, they could create something that might be seen as 'cool' to some, but certainly not the sleek, minimalistic elegance that Apple users have come to know, love and obsess about. Yes, there are many companies that may be able to better Apple in certain areas, but for the entire end-user experience cycle, Apple can't be beat - at least not yet.

When you license, you open the door to poor re-implementations and poor (and inconsistent) end user experiences.

The flipside is that you also open the door for better re-implementations that out-compete/embarrass your own products - which is the problem that Apple ran into when they authorized clones in the 90s.

You'll hear lots of revisionist history from Apple fanboys about how the clone makers somehow "betrayed" Apple by daring to compete for the same customers. But the purse and simple reality is that Apple couldn't even compete with their own licensees (or they just lacked the testicular fortitude).